Category: Manga-Comics

“Beating the Loneliness Monster” in Youkie Magazine

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Kookie Magazine recently changed its name to “Youkie“, but apart from that target audience which is now everyone aged 8-12, little has changed. In my fourth collaboration with Youkie, I did a 8-page story (to be released in 4-parts, one each quarterly issue) with my 11 year-old niece Kelly called “Beating the Loneliness Monster”.

Kelly supplied the story and the character designs, which is about how popular girl Jessica meets a boy called Tom in an online game called VR Quest. Initially impressed by Tom’s sense of humour, Jessica eventually meets him in real life, and is… disappointed. Kelly wrote this story due to her pre-teen understanding of how people’s online personas are often different to real life ones, and how to deal with that in person.

Check out the latest Oct2022 issue of Youkie magazine! This story will be released in 2-page increments for 4 issues of Youkie.

“Song Beastling” in Kookie Magazine

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Kookie Magazine, a quarterly magazine for girls 8-12, has released my latest 6-page story “Song Beastling”, written by myself and musician Yunyu Ong. It’s a story about a musical girl being haunted by a mythical Chinese beast the DiJiang, which is an actual “monster” entry in the ancient Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas.
And yes, it actually looks like a headless 6-legged beast with four wings – I’m not kidding. One of the cuter entries in a list of strange-looking cryptids that people once believed exist, retooled for the modern age.

Check it out at the Kookie Magazine website!

FOLIO: Manga Fandom in Australia

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I want to let you know about a short comics-prose essay I wrote, called “Manga Fandom in Australia”. Click on the link to read it!

Page 1 of “Manga Fandom in Australia”
Page 2 of “Manga Fandom in Australia”

My essay, which was specifically written in comics-prose format (rather than comics format), is meant to be about the rather the under-documented Australian manga fandom. Why is it under-documented? The essay will explain why–at the end of the day, this country still maintains a fair amount of xenophobia towards Japanese-style pop culture.

This essay is part of a new government-funded Australian Comics academic project called FOLIO, which is spearheaded a group of Comics Studies academics at University of Melbourne, RMIT & UTS. This multi-year project aims to chart the contemporary Australian comics scene, and I hope to incorporate Australian game-comics like “Framed” and “Florence” into it as well in the next few years, which I am currently researching for my PhD.

Kookie Magazine: One In, All In

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In my third collaboration with Kookie Magazine, a magazine for girls aged 7-12+, I teamed up with aboriginal writer Gayle Kennedy to create a story about three young aboriginal girls. Main character Rosie, who has spina bifida and thus needs a wheelchair, and her cousins Daisy and Lily live a normal and active life, until something happens that has them fight for respect and their rights.